kemmishtree

Never heard of this letter before, but it immediately made me think of Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight. To me it's a beautiful surrealistic masterpiece, written in the early 1940s, while Hitler was still alive. Hitler is a minor character, who memorably appears in a passage where he meets Jesus. I won't spoil it for you, but it still gives me goosebumps 25 years later thinking back on it. It's not a very long passage, but I think by itself it justifies reading the whole book, and I think it's more profound than Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

Robust biomarker monitoring in toilets would lead to a 95% reduction in cancer deaths.

Robust biomarker discovery in toilets would let us take care of most of the other 5%.

That's the main obvious humanitarian purpose of our project www.molecularReality.com

If we could give our product away, a ton of people would want it. Oh, and it would save the world. Oh, and in ten years we'd make a trillion dollars.

Know any intellectually honest investors you could show this to? www.molecularReality.com

Oh, and you should order one. But also, help us get the seed round so we can just give them away to the thousands of people who want to use them.

i have to leave this here www.molecularreality.com

I'd love to enable Keltar, the green guy in the ceramic cup, to do this www.molecularReality/QuestionDesk

So I write a completely defensible rant full of truly interesting and well-informed perspective, get downvoted, and then get accused of being an LLM.

A perspective I'm sure the down-voters have zero cred to doubt. Style issues aside, I don't think there's a serious molecular biologist on the planet who would take issue with the actual gist of what I said.

Pleiotropy: a thing happening can cause more than one other thing to happen. We really need jargon to keep that in mind?

An LLM? This is what I get for writing with passion? Creatively? Daring to play with words? I'm an LLM? For writing anything that doesn't fit your norms? Wow.

How do I get MORE downvotes? They seem like badges of honor in this case.

How could you say that when you didn't chat with it at all?

Oh and don't get an account it's broken right now, I'm building the site and hardly anyone has been there yet and the Auth0 is fucked up. But just give your email to Keltar if you wanna followup.

If you haven't heard the phrase "utility-scale molecular sensing" or given it any thought, please prepare to update every opinion you might have about bioterrorism, and ask Keltar how the MR1 is our greatest plausible non-authoritarian line of defense. www.molecularreality.com Keltar is the little green guy in the upper left.

I only comment on hacker news posts about biology because I'm a voice crying in the wilderness about the most important goddamn startup on Earth, I think, maybe. www.molecularReality.com

Talk to the little green guy in the upper right corner, though he probably doesn't remember posing for a photo opp with that statue in Point Pleasant several years ago... www.molecularReality.com

We're going to solve the "species ID" problem for... everything that people can find! Like the completely unidentifiable ladybug my Aunt found in her RV last week in the Texas panhandle—a bizarrely intricate carapace I can't match to any pics of ladybug species anywhere online... What the heck is it! Nobody knows, apparently. It starts with a unique citizen science project—one with bespoke molecular sensing hardware. (note I said it starts there, not that it reaches fruition immediately!) Check it out here: www.molecularReality.com

It's awesome when someone else writes you series A pitch for you. www.molecularReality.comr

This is a list of topics in biogerontology, not of "breakthroughs that could soon slow or reverse your biological age."

My all-time favorite science fiction novel.

Does that one share have all the voting power? Then for founders with real missions and real visions, it won't matter at all.

I think utility-scale solid-state molecular sensing is so vastly underhyped that you don't even know what I mean. Wait—you're asking about the thing that everyone on Earth is talking about 24 hours a day ceaselessly and asking if it's overhyped? Sorry, I misread the "Ask HN" somehow as "Do you think utility-scale solid-state molecular sensing is so underhyped that time travellers would be baffled that only one startup on Earth, namely Molecular Reality Corporation, is explicitly working on it with any kind of consistent technical vision?"

We need to build utility-scale solid-state molecular sensing, it's a threat to civilization not to build it, and only Molecular Reality Corporation is explicitly pursuing it with a specific technical vision.

You've got a long time—Will you please kindly take personal responsibility to ensure we see images of seasonal foliage changes in vast forests on superearths hundreds of light years away using billions of solar gravity lensing observatories built and launched by self-replicating processes? Also don't be a slacker and get first lens light by 2050?

i.e., Why We Need Utility-Scale Solid-State Molecular Sensing, Reason #53,444,001

Things are going great, and they're only getting better! I'm doing alright, and got interviewed on the Joe Roganoid Experiments—major exposure for our world-saving project! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYGnYjWtOSo&t=303s

Some family members of mine were in bed in their house during a thunderstorm and during a close lightning strike they heard a few seconds of music that sounded like a radio transmission, somehow being amplified throughout throughout the house as the lightning flashed. I believe their story, and wonder about the mechanism.

Just put e. coli in an ultracentrifuge and do a few hundred generations of serial passaging and see what evolves, for starters. You could do this pretty cheaply without waiting decades or killing mammals. Apparently e. coli can proliferate happily at almost half a million g... https://phys.org/news/2011-04-bacteria-extreme-gravity.html#....

We need utility-scale molecular sensing. How will we prevent bioterrorism when it gets much easier to make super-pathogens? How much freedom will we have to restrict? These questions are answered and/or mooted if enough people have solid-state, label-free, universal molecular sensing at home.

We are the weirdest and most underestimated startup on the planet. Reverse pitch us, and bring your A game. www.molecularreality.com

Reading all the comments here, there's a legit but crazy sounding scientific voice crying out in the wilderness "hey we need solid-state utility-scale molecular sensing and this is weirdly the way to get there." www.molecularreality.com If you want to help, get in touch.

Ah, thanks for the clicky! thought I had the markdown right for that but it didn't work. Guess I should re-RTFM.

We have prototype(s)—the main electronic part is set-in-stone, at least for the alpha launch, but some other things will change—and we've got these things in various places in various "boxes", including the 80s gaming console style you see on the site—but haven't settled on what we're shipping this summer—won't require extensive tooling or setup for this round, that'll be a beta launch thing. Right now, the basic requirement is a tidy box with shielding.

By scenarios, you mean the games listed above? No, the only game we've implemented is basically the complexity equivalent of "pong" and just something we've done for ourselves that's only fun because we love nanopores so much. The science behind the games is going to be the most important part early on, with the games structured more or less like game shows than like standalone pieces of software. These games will be played a hosted, social events with the alpha launch. That's the only way we can do it in time and with available, affordable mindpower.

thanks for noticing, and gently mocking, our overuse of ™. There's a very on-brand reason for it.

If you're an angel who might be convinced to put in something significant, reach out and let me talk you into it. Separate from that, do so as well if you just think it's worth knowing a lot more about, we're not yet overwhelmed with attention and I can respond personally to most of what comes to me.

My caffeine-addled brain can't resist these good questions but I really gotta go get that money. You should PM me and let's talk (better yet get on the mailing list/wait list on the website and I'll reach out to you this weekend.)

It's not limiting, quite the opposite. I already know that people who work in labs want this. How many of those are there? Versus, science fans who play video games, overall. Pretty big difference in addressable market size. More importantly, it detonates the priestly class. It's a gutenberg thing...

MORE more importantly, imagine you could "spin up" thousands of lab technicians at any time to do your experimental protocols at scale, except they're not miserable wage slaves, they're playing games and finding joy. You'd rather have that than a single instrument at your bench.

I'm actually glad it hasn't gone viral--we needed to hear this feedback first. It would suck to have a million page views and most people baffled by it as they are now... We (a small incredibly persistent and talented team) are working on the iteration that makes the whole thing clear to an intelligent ten year old--the version that will be worth doing press for and getting a featured post about.

ATM we need to close our seed round so we're ready to actually ship and support a small alpha release. Regardless of how much attention we have or even capital, it'll only make sense to have a few hundred out there as we work out the kinks. But viral attention and a ton of people having to wait for the beta is fine as well, and if they see how much fun the alpha group is having in spite of the kinks--a lot of the play will be in a kind of "game show" format live, that you'll be able to watch and participate in even without a console--that'll have an impact, I think.

Message me if you're an angel investor or willing to share it with people who will get on the phone with me and can invest. Either way, hope to see you on the sign up list!

And thank you for "getting it". Yes, it's literally an advanced scientific instrument disguised as a toy, and it's our trojan horse for solving biology at population scale, bringing along "the masses" into the adventure in a way like nothing else quite has. We've chewed through mountains of concrete to bring this to where it is, and I want early investors to envision that this might literally be the most important project in the history of biotech... So I read your post with glowing warmth and happiness, and I needed that today!